by Ian McDonald
‘You continue your mission by other means,’ Jake said ‘You seem well set up here; electricity, heat, food, water. But what happened to the dirigible crew?’
‘That is a bad thing,’ Henning Bork said. Gaby saw him look at his colleagues in the way that people do who need to get their stories straight. ‘A very bad thing. They tried to go back. They could not live here, they did not find in this place the intellectual excitement that ties us to it. They provisioned themselves with what we could spare from the wreckage of Tungus; which, as you can see, we efficiently recycled, and set off across the canopy. This was a long time ago, before we programmed in the defences. The Chaga was less, shall we say, busy? then.’
‘The Chaga was smaller too,’ Moran said, sensing the insult and returning it.
‘But much more dangerous,’ Astrid Montagnard said. Hubert was seated in her lap. He stared at Gaby. The brat never seemed to blink. ‘Strange, alien, dangerous. Now the Chaga is developing toward human norms, but then in those early days, everything was being tried. Everything.’
‘They didn’t come back,’ Gaby said.
‘Yes,’ Henning Bork said. ‘We do not know what became of them.’
‘The Wa-chagga know nothing about them,’ Lucius said.
‘But they could still be alive out there,’ Jake Aarons said. Gaby understood the reason behind the question.
‘They could,’ Henning Bork said.
‘The forest sustains you and the Wa-chagga,’ Jake continued. ‘It could also sustain them, couldn’t it? Could it do more than that? Could it somehow adapt them to live more closely with it? Enter into a kind of symbiotic relationship with them, change them? You said that this Breeding Pit was the Chaga’s engine of evolution, where life is varied. Human life, human flesh?’
‘What are you driving at, Mr Aarons?’ Henning Bork asked. The wind shook the great tree again. It felt wet and cold on Gaby’s skin, like secrecy.
‘Organic circuitry,’ she said, shifting the conversation from delicate subjects, like any civilized house guest. ‘Organic television?’
‘Yes,’ Henning Bork said.
‘Organic satellite television?’
‘This too.’
‘You can get SkyNet Sport? There’s a match I’d really hate to miss.’
~ * ~
43
‘One nil,’ Gaby stormed at her diary. ‘Tragic. The Dagenham Girl Pipers could have put up a better defence. Bizarre, watching Alan Jeffers’ half-time analysis on a television that looks like a head of melting broccoli in what used to be the control cabin of a Sibirsk airship but is now part of a Lost Boys Fantasy Tree House in the deepest, darkest depths of the Chaga.
‘The room they’ve given me is a tent of poles and blimp skin about fifty feet down-trunk from the main centre, right on the edge of what they call The Moat. The view in the morning should be memorable, if I’m still around to enjoy it. The wind is getting up; the whole place flaps and sways like a ship in a hurricane. Full sail ahead for the heart of darkness, me hearties! A ship cast adrift in the tree-tops; like something out of your favourite childhood story. A ragged crew of bourgeoisie marooned on a desert isle, playing out their genteel rituals. Too few faces, too often seen, I sense an almost incestuous introversion. Perhaps literally. They tell much; they keep more secret, but they’ve grown naive at secrecy from too much intimacy. They make mistakes, they are clumsy with their misdirections. This room, for example. Why do I get the feeing I’m hot-bunking in someone else’s space? Someone who isn’t accounted for by Treetops crew manifest, spooky Hubert included. Something not kosher here.’
~ * ~
There was a polite cough from outside the door curtain. Gaby put down her pencil, closed the diary. The curtain rolled up on its drawstring.
‘Got a moment?’ Jake Aarons asked. He came in anyway. ‘I think I have a sane explanation for the voices.’
‘Not the voice of the Chaga.’
‘Yes, the voice of the Chaga. But not mystically or magically or divinely. Scientifically. The Chaga can synthesize organic circuits; you’ve watched goddam organic satellite television soccer. If it can build out there, why not in here?’ He tapped his forehead with a finger. ‘What’s this stuff in here but the cellular circuitry for an organic computer? From the moment I crossed terminum, the Chaga’s been building an organic modem in my head out of my own protein, molecule by molecule, cell by cell, strand by strand. Networking me into this immense data storage and processing system. That’s why it’s getting louder and clearer: the connections are spreading. It’s not just voices now, Gab. It’s visions - pictures, images, like snapshot memories; glimpses for the briefest second of the utmost clarity, then gone.’
‘Pictures of what, Jake?’
‘Other lives, Gab. Other worlds. Other ways of being. And of this world as well. Peter Werther was right. They’ve been here before. At the very start of humanity, and the very start of it all. Those things we have recorded in the Burgess Shale; the incredible diversity of life in the pre-Cambrian, like never before or since . . .’
‘They did it?’
Jake shrugged. The wind billowed the fragile room. Gaby was very conscious of the great gulf beneath her.
‘Jake, why don’t we all hear the voices and see the visions? Why is it just you?’
He grimaced painfully.
‘I have a theory about that too. I’ll not mince words: this circuitry, this organic modem growing in my head, it’s a mutation. Something is causing the cells of my body to grow in such a way as to receive electromagnetic signals from the Chaga, and trigger my own neurons in response. Something is reprogramming the DNA in those cells to grow that way. Now, that is a very difficult thing to do in a developed organism. Easy enough in the sex cells of your parents so that the offspring will express the mutation, but to get into all the necessary cells, and change their programming, then switch it on: that’s difficult.
‘Unless something is already present in the body, in the cells, in the DNA, that acts as a host. A vector. A mole on the inside of the genetic firewall to open the way for the DNA hackers.’
‘The HIV 4 virus.’
Jake grimaced again.
‘Every day during the desert campaign in World War Two, Field Marshal Montgomery would study a photograph of Erwin Rommel he kept on his desk. Not say a word, just look at it. Know your enemy was Montgomery’s motto. It won him the desert war. I know my enemy, Gab. I’ve studied all his strategies and tactics; his surprise offensives, his tactical retreats and regroupings. He’s tough - tougher than me - but I know how he works. I know what his weapons are, and on what terrain he likes to fight - right down in the chromosomes, street fighting in the DNA strands - and what camouflage he uses to outfox my immune system. But maybe I have overestimated him: maybe he isn’t the undercover death squad, maybe he’s just the Trojan horse that gets taken into the city and opens the gates to let in the real invading army. And, maybe, it isn’t an invading, destroying army out there, but foreign industrialists and investors. Maybe they don’t want to put everyone to the sword, but set up a shop here, a factory there, a resort someplace else, do a little urban renewal, stick in some new infrastructure, and by the time they’ve finished you’re a little colonial outpost of some biochemical superpower.’
‘I’m getting a little lost in analogy, Jake. You think the HIV 4 virus is some kind of catalyst that allows the Chaga mutagenic agents to work on developed cells?’
‘Catalyst,’ Jake said. ‘That’s exactly the word. That doesn’t react in the process. It fits, Gab: all the secrecy around Unit 12 and the HIV 4 victims who should have been dead year ago. All exposed to the Chaga. All entered into some kind of symbiotic relationship that stops the HIV 4 virus from developing into AIDS.’
‘You were fishing from Henning Bork at dinner.’
‘He didn’t deny it.’
‘Jesus, Jake, you said you had a sane explanation.’ The hovering biolights flared up at Gaby’s raised voice. ‘You kn
ow what this implies about HIV 4?’
‘It’s a made thing.’ Jake nodded. ‘I’ve thought of that. It certainly predates humanity, maybe most of life on earth. It’s the Chaga-makers’ engine of variation, and a hideously effective one: only those infected individuals who expose themselves to the mutagenic agents survive. Maybe it wasn’t an asteroid impact that eradicated the dinosaurs, or habitat depletion: maybe they had progressed into an evolutionary dead end and the Chaga-makers undertook a little winnowing.’
‘Jurassic AIDS?’
‘Maybe. Maybe the SIVs and HIV 1, 2 and 3 are degenerate variants of the original virus. Given the virus’s ability to switch sections of genetic material, maybe there are millions of variants of the HIV 4 virus. Scientists have always had a chicken-and-egg problem with viruses. Maybe they all came from someplace else.’
‘Lots of maybes, Jake.’
‘Are you telling me that I believe it because I want to believe it? You were the one handed me this magic bullet in the first place.’
The wind gusted up from below, bringing with it the chiming calls of unseen, unimaginable creatures. The balloon-silk walls flapped and swelled. The captive lights globes gusted around the little fabric room, casting sudden strange shadows.
~ * ~
Hubert climbed like an animal. Gaby’s heart almost stopped when she saw him go straight up the bole on the edge of the moat. ‘He’s born to it,’ Henning Bork assured her. That sentence means more than it says, Gaby thought. As they moved through the high canopy toward the escarpment where the Treetoppers maintained their watch post, Gaby could feel the child, up there in the dense overgrowth, stalking the slow, clumsy adults. Hidden eyes, watching. The disturbing thing was that even when the boy was back with them, she could still feel them, watching. An hour up the valley in which Treetops rested brought the small expedition to the observatory. It was a cupola of spars and silk scavenged from the wreck of the Tungus, perched on the scarp where it fell sheer to the Breeding Pit below. Henning Bork, Yves Montagnard, Jake Aarons and Gaby McAslan fitted into it like segments of an orange. Gaby tried to unsling the camcorder without injuring anyone.
‘Where’s Hubert vanished to now?’ Jake asked.
‘He’ll be playing somewhere,’ Yves Montagnard said. Gaby thought she would not be so unconcerned if it were her flesh and blood playing around such sheer drops and pitfalls. But Jake had found her something to video.
She remembered the land beneath her from the microlyte flight. She had thought it looked like a Willow Pattern plate. Now she was on the very edge of it, and it did not look like that at all. She slowly swung the camera across the spars and swelling spheres and thought it looked like something flayed and festering, all blue veins and gas-bloated, suppurating flesh straining at skeletal ribs. It looked fleshy and obscene and intimate, like a laparoscopy of a cancerous ovary.
At the limit of her zoom, at the foot of the Citadel, a bubble burst in a spurt of milky liquid and powder. Something darted from it, too far and fast for the camera to follow. She panned up the dark green rampart of the Citadel, to the clouds that hung over Kilimanjaro. Peter Werther had been brought there and set down, ass-naked as Adam in Eden. He had walked away from Eden, and the price of it was a disinfected white suite deep under Kajiado Centre, and multinational doctors measuring the advance of his own private Chaga across his body. Anything that comes out of it is theirs, Dr Dan had said. She looked at Jake, talking excitedly with Henning Bork. He fulfilled their criteria. They would claim him. They would take him down into their circular corridors and locked doors and never let him see the light of day again. She looked at Jake and feared for him. But he was not stupid. Many things, some sins, but never stupid. He knew all this as well as she, and he had made his decision.
He wasn’t coming back.
‘Some of the larger bubbles contain whole ecosystems in miniature,’ Henning Bork was saying, scanning the Breeding Pit with binoculars. ‘Like little, what is the word? dioramas, of life on other planets. Of course, it is one of our many frustrations that we cannot reach them in time to sample them; they only last a day or so before they are reabsorbed. Before we ran out of disc space, we videoed many hours’ footage of these dioramas. Frequently we cannot comprehend what we are seeing. Sometimes we cannot recognize it as living at all. Occasionally we have seen things so alien as to be horrifying. Ah! Luck is with us!’ .
He pointed over the rail. Gaby followed in on to a huge bubble a mile to the west. The skin was painfully distended against the hoops of blue ribbing. Gaby thought incongruously of sex toys an old partner of her had liked to sport. The bubble rippled, as if kicked from inside and split. White dust sprayed from the rent. The skin tore in a dozen places and collapsed. Behind the camera, Gaby now thought of ancient newsreel footage of the destruction of the Hindenburg. But cold. Without fire.
Even at highest magnification, Gaby could not tell if the thing inside the bubble was natural or artificial, organic or inorganic. City, forest; forest, machine. It looked like a city, or a forest, or a handful of stone fingers. Each was the height of a small skyscraper: the proportions of the Breeding Pit could have reduced Manhattan to a toy town in a plastic snow storm. City, Gaby decided on the basis of the regular geometric patterns on the sides of the stone pillars. They were in the shape of three-dimensional fractals of ever diminishing tetrahedrons. Terracotta red. Some of the larger formations were fifty feet in diameter, stubbled with smaller arrays of tetrahedrons. Gaby cursed the camera’s lack of resolution: the surfaces of the tetrahedron formations seemed in motion.
‘You’re right.’ Henning Bork answered her puzzled frown. ‘It’s a living fractal. Each generation of tetrahedrons grows out of the surface of its parent. Some are in the process of sporing - when the tetrahedrons reach the molecular level, they leave the parent body and migrate across the rock surface to a new seeding zone. This is a diorama we have recorded several times before. We believe it is a kind of living clay that uses chemical energy to reproduce itself from the minerals of its parent rock. A parasitic living clay, perhaps. There is evidence that terrestrial clays were a matrix for early forms of RNA molecules. Perhaps this is the end-point of a different geological RNA-based evolution.’
A warning flashed in Gaby’s view-finder. Disc change. Last disc.
The Chaga’s reconstruction of a living clay it encountered somewhere on its travels,’ Yves Montagnard added.
‘Buckyball golems,’ Jake whispered.
~ * ~
Hubert rejoined the little expedition on the trek back to Tree-tops. Whatever he had found out along the escarpment ridge, it had made him remember what it was to be a boy. But in her diary that night, Gaby still made insidious comparisons with Fraser and Aaron Shepard. It was not just that they were Shepard’s kids and they had been part of one of the great times of her life. Hubert was too much a child of his environment. His strangeness seemed almost genetic. Gaby closed her diary and tried to sleep, but found herself continually waking with a powerful sensation of not being alone in her little canvas cell. Each time, the only presence was her own. She would force herself back into sleep and dream of things that had watched her unseen in the Chaga canopy, followed her back to Treetops and come flapping across the air moat to smother her with flopping skin wings.
She woke with a cry.
In the room. It was in the room.
At the sound of her voice, the bioluminescents woke and filled the fabric cube with a green glow. By their light, something moved. Gaby rolled out of her hammock on to the spongy floor and grabbed her Magnum from her pack. The red seed of the laser sight wove across the billowing walls and came to rest on the forehead of a four year-old white girl with hair as black as the night outside. Her face was as thin as famine.
‘Light!’ Gaby shouted. The bioluminescents brightened. Crouching on the floor, Gaby and the girl stared at each other, tied by a thread of laser. Then the girl gave a cry, ran to the window and before Gaby could catch her or stop her or war
n her, dived out into four hundred feet of moat. Gaby screamed and lunged for the window. By the dim light from the tier forest, she saw a thing very like a very large, very pale bat ghost across the gulf. It flew on webs of skin stretched between wrists and ankles. Gaby saw it light on a branch and turn a dark-eyed, black-haired smiling face to her.
~ * ~
44
They were arguing again in their private patois of French, English and Russian. Gaby banged a plate hard on the table. It broke cleanly along across the middle. They all looked at her.
‘Your daughter?’ she demanded.
Nothing slept soundly in Treetops. Gaby’s cries had roused the colony in less than a minute. Fearing assault, Lucius and the Black Simbas had armed themselves. There had been potentially fatal misrecognitions as the hives of bioluminescents warmed up. Order had inhered at the centre, on the bridge, around the Scandinavian calm of Henning Bork. He had given Gaby the floor to tell what she had seen. Then the arguing had started.